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There has been a lot of hype news in robotics + AI lately, as the AI updates just continue to come at a blinding pace. From Tesla/XAI we have the Optimus robot, which I can't tell if this is a major breakthrough or just another marketing splash driven by Elon.
On the other side of the fence, you have Nvidia releasing an open foundational model for robotics and partnering with Disney of all companies to make a droid robot.
You also have Google's I/O, which I haven't had the energy to look into.
With the speed of AI updates and the wars of hype, it's always hard to tell who is actually advancing the frontier. But it does seem that in particular robotics are advancing quite rapidly compared to even a couple of years ago. Personally I think that while automating white collar work is useful and such, AI entering into robotics will be the real game changer. If we can begin to massively automate building things like housing, roads, and mass manufactured goods, all of the sudden we get into an explosive growth curve.
Of course, this is where AGI doomer fears do become more salient, so that's something to watch out for.
Either way, another day, another AI discourse. What do you think of this current crop of news?
It’s true that robotics is getting renewed attention, but this seems to be more the result of increased investment rather than any foundational sea change in knowledge or theory. The fixation on a bipedal and human-ish one is also just that, a fixation, and still leads to some difficulty even moving around consistently - see for example the robot marathon and of course claims that the Tesla robots have been somewhat relying on human controllers last I heard. No new paradigms yet there.
There continues to be progress on the LLM front but this is actually, maybe contrary to the impression you are getting, slowing. I wouldn’t call it a plateau at all but there’s a real sense of struggle out there. Most of the focus in the last six months has been tool use of various kinds, rather than fundamental improvements, though there are some theoretical ideas kicking around that might prove fruitful. On the contrary the major research labs have started to see some diminishing returns. Meta notably can’t even catch fully up to the front players and most of the team quit in frustration. Anthropic has been stuck in a bit of a rut with 3.7 only a mixed improvement over 3.5 and in some ways a regression. OpenAI has had trouble getting the so-called “version 5” off the ground that’s an impressive enough improvement to deserve the name. Google is catching up and adding some neat things. Context windows are going up. “Agent” systems are being experimented with more. Video generation is showing some sparks of brilliance but the compute required is pretty steep. Deepfake video and voice, even real time stuff, is the biggest issue right now, more than any AGI crap.
Do you have any source on this? I'd love to learn more.
This article is a good top level summary. This post was unverified but the reasons seem to match other reporting that the most recent model is a massive sunk cost. The head and VP not only both resigned last month but also asked their names not to be put on the eventual release. “Most of the team” probably overstated sorry. I accidentally took out of context the still notable fact that 11 of 14 of the authors of a major paper on the fundamental AI research team at Meta have left since publication and formation in 2023. Either way, Meta is behind absolutely but everyone is slowing. IMO we need another theoretical leap, probably about implementing “memory”, to keep progress rolling.
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The fixation on humanoids is understandable: a humanoid robot is a drop-in replacement for a human worker. When I use a food delivery service I often select a courier robot. It's a cute box on six wheels that drives to my apartment block entrance. But the delivery company can use them because I live in a sizable neighborhood between a railroad and a stroad that is both flat and full of restaurants.
A wheeled box can't cross the stroad because it can't use an underpass. A wheeled box can't cross the railroad either because there's an overpass. A wheeled box can't get to my front door as there are a few insurmountable obstacles even in the apartment complex: the first door leading to the lobby has an anti-hobo lock that you need three fingers to open, the second door has an intercom and is quite heavy, then there's a small flight of stairs leading to the elevator (there's a ramp, but you have to unlock and lower it), the robot then has to call the elevator and ring my doorbell.
In a country like the US that has ADA-compliant everything it's probably easier to build a useful delivery robot that can get around on wheels with a single button-pressing finger, but this is still quite limiting. You can't put a hundred of them into a warehouse or a sweatshop without rebuilding it to be robot-accessible. Everything in our lives is designed for human bodies, it's a very obvious target for the robotics industry.
I can honestly say this is the first time seeing that word ever used. But then again, I don't think I've ever really made a distinction between a "street" and a "road" before, let alone thought of something in between.
'Stroad' is a shibboleth, generally meaning "[I don't like] roads that have more than one lane and are generally unobstructed".
Not exactly. A freeway is not a stroad. An arterial without businesses or housing that serves to move people from place to place is also not a stroad.
Generally, a stroad is a high or medium-speed road with housing or commercial areas right on it.
Really, the reason they exist is cost. It's cheap to take a one-lane-bidirectional road that has a bunch of existing development on it, expand it out to 2, maybe put a center turning lane in it, and you have what is effectively a highway.
Strong Towns and the other anti-car people get extremely butthurt about "but muh suburban financial sustainability", but this is why this kind of construction exists in the first place. Same with the 4-way stop and the traffic light; it doesn't require a few million dollars per intersection like roundabouts do (it's the cheaper, more technologically-advanced option, though it of course does make other sacrifices).
Yes, it'll cost you more lives and property damage because someone didn't look both ways and got (them or their car) hit by another car going 50 mph, but human safety and human dignity (in this case, the dignity of not living in a million-dollar shoebox and it only taking 10 minutes to get to your destination rather than 60) are always two sides of the same coin.
This is only the case in the situation where the development isn't actually on the road or the lanes are super wide.
I'm not sure what your claim is, exactly. Are you saying that stop signs are technologically advanced? Or that you can have stop signs on a road where the speed limit is 50 (based on your next paragraph)? I certainly haven't seen that before.
Wide, high speed roads are a nuisance to live near (ask me how I know), so I don't know that it's a big increase in dignity to make every road a 45MPH arterial.
I'm not sure what you are getting at with your 10 minute vs 60 minute journey hypothetical. The places where it takes 10 minutes to make a trip and the places where it takes 60 minutes to drive an equivalent distance are not the same, and this goes back to the land usage in the first part. You can't expand the roads endlessly, because there's stuff on the side of the road, and to make things worse, that stuff on the side of the road is why people travel in the first place, and with wider roads those places are forced further apart except in totally rural areas.
You can't take e.g. San Francisco and replace every two lane road with a six lane road to fix the traffic without running out of land or building double decker freeways in the middle of the city.
In general, my preferred mode of living is a medium town with quiet, shaded streets in town so that people can walk and bike around and kids can play in the street without getting oneshotted by a driver scroooolling tiktoks at 50 MPH. This is incompatible with wide roads with high speed limits, aka, stroads.
For everything else, there's the interstate.
Isn’t this a solved problem in a more local sense? You just put a housing development off the main road with deliberately curved and winding streets which has the natural effect of slowing down car speeds and limiting through traffic as long as the entry points were sensibly chosen. No need to be a mid sized town, this can be dropped into bigger city outskirts.
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in each direction (two in total)
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It's not exactly a stereotypical suburban American stroad, given that I live in a massive metropolis, but the effect is similar: Soviet urban planners had a cyclopean sense of scale, their successors saw a quick and dirty solution to the traffic issues: why build highways when you can just build a dozen lanes in the existing right of way?
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Anti-car people made it up even though there was already a word for it (arterial road or arterial highway).
To be fair, IMO it isn't a totally useless word. There is value in differentiating between a generic "urban arterial" road and an "urban arterial" that specifically favors long-distance travel while giving nothing but lip service to local access and pedestrians, where a limited-access road that doesn't even try to accommodate local access and pedestrians would be safer. Compare US 130 in Pennsauken, NJ (awful unfixable grandfathered design), with NJ 70 in Cherry Hill, NJ (much better).
t. civil engineer (roadway, not traffic, so not really an expert on this topic)
The actual fix for US 130 was the construction of I-295. What remains is only residual problems. As US 130, it was intended for long-distance travel; all mainline US system roads were.
(Fun fact: at one point late in the construction of I-295, it was possible to take US 130 North to I-295 North and end up back where you started; getting caught in such a loop gave me serious hatred for US 130)
By no means has US 130 been fixed. The buildings are so close to the traveled way, and the lanes are so narrow (because, many decades ago, it was converted from two lanes with a shoulder in each direction to three lanes with no shoulder in each direction), that those buildings regularly get hit by errant cars. And there are so many driveways, and the state govt.'s right of way is so narrow (especially after space has been reserved for sidewalk), that even putting up guide rail to prevent these crashes is impossible.
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It's a term recently coined by people who want to eliminate cars.
The term was coined by Chuck Marohn at Strong Towns, who absolutely does not want to eliminate cars - at the point where he founded Strong Towns he lived in a suburb of Brainerd MN (micropolitan area population 99k) which even urbanists don't think is going to be a transit city. It is also geographically small enough (the contiguous built-up area around Brainerd proper is <10 miles across) that slowing the traffic in the city and inner suburbs to 30MPH isn't going to add more than a few minutes to anyone's journey. If you live in a town the size of Brainerd, there is no need for anything intermediate between city streets and the main road from Brainerd to the next town over.
Given Marohn's published views on stroad repair, I suspect he sees the Texas solution - use part of the right-of-way for a limited-access road and part for "frontage roads" (which are actually streets in Marohn's taxonomy) and only allow access between them every few miles - as the correct one if you have enough traffic to justify that much tarmac. US-19 north of Tampa Bay - identified by various people as the worst stroad in America - looks like an example where there is enough space to do this.
I wonder if Texas got this from Mexico? This is a common pattern in high-traffic areas down there, although IME the driving experience kind of sucks that may be more for Mexico reasons than a flaw with the concept.
The issue is mostly "how do you turn left (and/or cross over) without a bunch of traffic lights on the arterial"?
In Mexico they just... put a bunch of traffic lights on the arterial, with predictable impacts on congestion -- plus the added quirk that left turns are for some reason accomplished by pulling into the slip road to your right, waiting for a left-turn light, then turning left across both directional lanes on the arterial part (also the opposite slip road I guess).
It's kind of fun, but I don't really get it.
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How's that work, exactly? I know they live a hard lifestyle at the best of times, and apparently they're now losing fingers to xylazine too in some areas, but I would have assumed that most hobos still have 8 or 9 fingers, minimum, nowhere near down to 3 per hand even.
Nah, the anti-hobo part is knowing which three buttons to press out of ten, requiring enough fingers to do this is the anti-robot side effect.
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